Location: Kansas
I’m going to try to keep this as brief as I can… but it’s a long story.
My wife and I (both women, late 30s and mid 40s) adopted our daughter out of foster care. We live in Kansas, she came from a different state. She came to us at 14, we finalized when she was 15, she is now 19.
Unknown to us, she had severe behavioral problems, substance abuse issues, and mental health diagnoses. She functions at about the level of a kid in late elementary school. The foster care agency told us she was fine… because they didn’t test her for anything.
We have dealt with years of navigating the mental health system, putting resources in place, dealing with hospitalizations and law enforcement contact, etc. We have worked with therapists, psychiatrists, treatment teams, case managers, teachers, school counselors, you name it.
Throughout all of this, she was going out of her way to try and destroy us. We were held hostage to her emotions. We felt like prisoners in our own home.
She has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. When she turned 18, she was in the middle of an inpatient hospital stay. At the hospital’s encouragement, we became her legal guardians.
We got her on the right meds and discharged from the hospital. She graduated high school. We got her into a job program for people with special needs, which was going to pay for trade school in addition to finding her first job. We got her into drivers ed and she was on her way to getting her learners permit.
Everything was going great, and then she stopped taking her meds, got back on drugs, and ran from home with just a backpack. She left behind 90% of her things. She abandoned the job she liked and was doing well at.
She stayed with her high school drug dealer, and then we found out that she somehow made it back to her home state. She is with her bio family, who all have substance abuse and mental illness concerns of their own.
We can’t do it anymore. We have been setting ourselves on fire to keep her warm for five years. There is nothing further that we can do for her. We just want to let her go so we can begin to heal from the trauma we’ve gone through. This is the safest and most free we have felt in years.
TLDR:
My first question is how to remove ourselves as her guardians. She is still a danger to herself and others, but we have nothing left to give. I don’t think the orders cross state lines anyway.
My second question is what kind of notice and timeframe do we have to give her to come get her things? When are they considered abandoned? We bought most of it. We do not have an address for her, and we couldn’t afford to ship any of it even if we did. We do not feel safe having her bio family come get it.
My third questions is do we have to do anything other than write a will to make sure she doesn’t get everything when we die?
Thanks for reading this, and for any advice.
(EDIT: removed some potentially identifying information)